he
Dominican Studies Institute came into being less than ten years ago,
a difficult time for the City University. Budget-crunching was in the
air, and tuition hikes, hiring freezes, downsizing, and restructuring
had become the order of the day. Such was the institutional climate
when the University's Dominicans made a reasonable request. They urged
CUNY to create a research unit devoted to the mission of gathering,
producing, and disseminating data on the experience of their people
in the United States and elsewhere. Dominicans, after all, represented
one of the city's largest ethnic communities.

Chairman of the Board of Trustees
Herman Badillo interviewing Silvio Torres-Saillant on CUNY-TV.

The first crucial
meeting took place at 80th Street in the fall of 1990, Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds
having succeeded Joseph Murphy. Donald Smith of Baruch College, head of CUNY's
African-American Network, and Lehman College's Edgar Rodriguez, chair of the Puerto
Rican Council on Higher Education, came with faculty members Ramona Hernandez
of LaGuardia Community College and this writer, from Hostos Community College,
both as officers of the Council of Dominican Educators. On the table was a jointly
authored position paper addressing the educational needs of our respective communities.

The concept paper's
call for a Dominican research initiative particularly attracted the
Chancellor because it described the most alarming situation. Only
two Dominicans then held permanent positions on the University faculty,
in contrast to the already sizable presence of Dominicans in CUNY
classrooms. Experience of their culture was served only by the occasional
"Dominican heritage" course taught by an adjunct. Dominicans
did not even appear in the ethnic reference sources in CUNY libraries.
When we met with the Chancellor, the election of the first Dominican
to the City Council (Guillermo Linares) and of another to the State
Assembly (Adriano Espaillat) had not yet taken place. But the figures
we presented commanded attention. The increase of the city's-and the
University's-Dominican population was already a clear trend. According
to fall 1998 data, Hispanics made up 22% of the total enrollment in
the senior colleges and 32% in the community colleges, with Dominicans
constituting the largest share of that growth. Dominicans outnumbered
all segments of the Latino, Latin American, and Caribbean student
population at BCC, BMCC, City, LaGuardia, Lehman, and Hostos Colleges,
while occupying second or third place on six other campuses.

This has to do with the larger demographic picture. The 1990
census registered 511, 297 Dominicans living as permanent residents in the U.
S., with more than 65% of them living in the state of New York. By 1997, the Dominican
population nationwide had reached 832,000, of whom 495,000 resided in New York
City, making them the city's second largest Hispanic subgroup, after Puerto Ricans,
and the fastest-growing ethnic minority. Favorable
reaction to our concept was followed up by vigorous advocacy by CUNY's small Dominican
cohort and the invaluable support of high-ranking CUNY Latinos, notably Frank
Bonilla, who then headed the Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños at Hunter
College, and CUNY trustee Gladys Carrion. Ana Garcia Reyes (then at City College
and now at Hostos Community College) and Ramona Hernández (then at LaGuardia
Community College) approached Hostos President Isaura Santiago Santiago and convinced
her to release me with pay to relocate to City College for two years to develop
this research initiative.

That investment, plus two small, windowless rooms at City College,
and an allocation from the Chancellor, allowed us to begin. Two years
after our 80th Street meeting, in 1992, the Dominican Studies Institute
(DSI) was a reality. In February 1994, the Board of Trustees formally
approved it as a research unit. In the years since Board approval,
DSI has averaged eight well-attended conferences, symposia, and panels
per year on social science and humanities topics.

Among
distinguished participants in its functions have been Haiti's president Jean Bertrand
Aristide, former Dominican president Juan Bosch, the prominent Caribbean poet
and historian Kamau Bruthwaite, the best selling Haitian-American author Edwidge
Danticat, award-winning Dominican-American writers Julia Alvarez, Junot Diaz and
Rhina Espaillat, as well as many prominent intellectuals from the Dominican Republic
and top U.S. experts on Dominican topics. The Institute has earned induction into
the Inter-University Program for Latino Research (IUPLR), a nation-wide consortium
of 13 major university-based Latino research enterprises, headquartered at the
University of Notre Dame. Serving as a residency site for the Rockefeller Foundation
Humanities Fellowships program, DSI hosted ten resident scholars between 1996
and 1999.

Most
notable among publications sponsored by DSI is The Dominican Republic: A National
History by the leading Dominican historian, Frank Moya Pons (1995). It is the
first major Dominican history in English to appear since Sumner Welles's Naboth's
Vineyard of 1928. Sarah Aponte's Dominican Migration to the United States, 1970-
1997: An Annotated Bibliography appeared last year; she is DSI's librarian and
administrative coordinator. This year, as part of its Foundational Documents Series,
the Institute published Daisy Cocco De Filippis' Documents of Dissidence: Selected
Writings by Dominican Women, an English-language compilation of non-fiction prose
by Dominican women from 1849 through the 1990s. De Filippis, the holder of three
CUNY degrees, has taught at York College since 1978.

The Institute also
supports trade and university presses interested in issuing Dominican titles,
among them Countersong to Walt Whitman and Other Poems (Azul Editions, 1993),
a bilingual anthology of Pedro Mir, the late Dominican poet laureate, and The
Dominican Americans (Greenwood, 1998), a volume co-authored by long-time Institute
associate Ramona Hernández and this writer. DSI boasts the only university-based
Dominican Studies library in the U. S. Its resources have aided the research of
such scholars as Yale's Patricia Pessar (Visa for a Dream), Vanderbilt University's
William Luis (Dance Between Two Cultures), NYU's Barbara Fischkin (Muddy Cup),
and Washington Post reporter Roberto Suro (Strangers Among Us).

With its modest
yearly allocation not rising significantly, bringing the Dominican
Studies Institute to its present level of activity has required
ingenuity. High hopes are present, however, as a search commenced
this fall for the position of a director the Institute can call
its own. Last November the Institute received word from the Rockefeller
Foundation of a $76,000 grant to support a two-part transnational
conference to be held in New York and Santo Domingo this June. Titled
"Up from the Margins: Diversity as Challenge to the Democratic
Nation," the conference will convene Chicano, Puerto Rican,
African-American, Cuban, and Dominican scholars, artists, and activists
to explore the interplay of diversity and democracy. The conference
will complement the Dominican Institute's primary goal, which I
expressed to Chairman of the Board of Trustees Herman Badillo when
I appeared as a guest on his CUNY TV program, Education Forum, in
November. This is to help New York learn about itself. For there
is no stopping the continued growth of Dominicans as an ever larger
component of the city's population.